Movies: Ismail Merchant

A bored lawyer and a suffragette vie for the attention of a faith healer's charismatic daughter....

An English novelist travels to Bombay to watch one of her novels translated to film. She chases after the movie's leading man while the screenwriter chases after her....

40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds,...

When her husband's arrest leaves her penniless, a woman accepts an invitation to move in with a strange couple....

A documentary about making The Remains of the Day....

Set during World War II, an upper-class family begins to fall apart due to the conservative nature of the patriarch and the progressive values of his children....

"Roseland" is made up of three stories, sometimes connecting, all set in the famed New York City dance palace, and all having the same theme: finding the right dance partner....

A young girl agrees to work in a center for girls who can't stay with their parents. She gets wrapped up in the plights of several of the girls, and tries to help them, but only gets herself into trouble with her parents and supervisor....

An adaptation of Henry James' novel about the Countess Eugenia Münster and her brother Robert, expatriate Americans who have grown up in Europe. Returning to prosperous relatives in New England, Eugenia hopes to make an advantageous marriage with a w...

The story of a family troupe of English actors who travel around the towns and villages in India giving performances of Shakespearean plays. Through their travels we see the changing face of India as the old is replaced by the new, Maharajas become h...

Britain's top pop artiste, Tom Pickle, travels to Bombay, India, circa 1960s to learn to play the sitar from renowned maestro Ustad Zafar Khan....

Documentary about Merchant Ivory Productions, including interviews with the principals of the film production company and actors which have appeared in their films....

An expatriated French novelist returns to Paris when she learns that her childhood home is being placed on the auction block....

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Ismail Merchant's feature directorial debut addresses a subject close to his heart: the expressive Urdu language of Northern India, in danger of extinction as political trends and modernization obscure its contributions to Indian culture. Merchant 's...

Two teachers vie for the right to stage a play written by Jane Austen when she was twelve years old....

This fictionalized story, based on the family life of writer James Jones, is an emotional slice-of-life story. Jones is portrayed here as Bill Willis, a former war hero turned author who combats alcoholism and is starting to experience health problem...

A gay young man is recruited into an illicit love triangle to watch a much older man’s sexual liaison, but ends up witnessing what turns out to be his murder. The next day the young man's opera diva mother informs him that his estranged father has be...

The drama, adapted from a story by Katherine Anne Porter, tells of a Swedish immigrant who arrives on a small Texas farm at the turn of the century for work, is hired, and subsequently, and inadvertently, causes the downfall of his employer when a su...

After an abandoned young woman in late 19th Century England is taken in by a rural couple with three handsome sons, tragic consequences result....